


the desert repenting

by radialarch



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:07:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21827206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: Cheris and Jedao look for a moth, and find some answers. [Post-Glass Cannon]
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan
Comments: 17
Kudos: 52
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	the desert repenting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



> ExtraPenguin, I wanted to give you "it is a beautiful day in the hexarchate and you are a horrible voidmoth," but this became... something else. I hope you enjoy it anyway!
> 
> Thanks to G & P for handholding and encouragement. Title from (what else?) "Wild Geese".

“Still no signs.”

Servitor 1491625, in flashing red hues, told Cheris that _she_ was welcome to try flying into hostile calendrical terrain in pursuit of a moth young enough that its formants barely made a ripple on the scans. Cheris hadn’t meant the words as a criticism, but she tapped out an apology anyway. The Pyrehawk enclave were invested in this voidmoth, and 1491625 had earned the right to be a little testy.

{Show me the estimates one more time,} Jedao said inside her head, and then, half a beat behind, out loud beside her. She didn’t startle at that twinned echo anymore, but it was a stretch to say that she was used to it. She pulled up the relevant equations, along with the associated graphs, and set them alight for Jedao. The standard deviations were still much too large for Cheris’s liking, but it had been the best she could do under the circumstances. Nirai Kujen had been the mind behind every advance to the mothdrives, and now he was dead.

The problem was understanding the behavior of _wild_ moths. No such thing had ever existed in hexarchate space. Only a select few even knew that the moths behind mothdrive technology were sentient. Hexarch Shuos Mikodez was one of them, and Cheris had no doubt that he would have set his most trusted analysts to the problem, but it was too risky to tap that source of information when she wasn’t convinced the results would be any better. Cheris had done the interpolations with 1491625’s help, and they had the needlemoth to serve as a basis for the model, at least. It was just that overfitting was bad practice even when it might not get them killed.

“Won’t be the model that kills us,” Jedao said. “The Taurags, perhaps, the Hafn, or any of the other handful of empires whose territory we’ll be trespassing upon. The moth is the least of our problems. Save your worry for something that matters.”

Jedao wasn’t precisely wrong, but his flippancy bothered her. “Those gravitational perturbations left on the outer moon were strong,” she pointed out. “It’s a very characteristic pattern. Anyway, _you_ can talk to the moth, if we find one.” She didn’t have that luxury, even if she was telepathically linked to the man who did. 

She used to find strength in depending on someone, when she had still been Kel.

“Formation effects wouldn’t be dependable here anyway,” Jedao said, frank but not unkind. “Why did you choose these search parameters?”

“It’s a standard sweep,” she said, glad for the direct question. “Start with the initial conditions, then an iterative search process.” She ran the simulation for him, highlighting sectors at each step. “It’s the most efficient method—”

“—when the search object’s trajectory is random,” Jedao said. “This one isn’t. Look, the moth is only a hatchling.” He pointed to an irregularity they’d found on the scans two weeks ago, and then another. “Could be noise, but I think it’s _playing_.”

“Jedao,” Cheris said, appalled. “It’s a moth, not a child.” There was a fond memory at the edges of Jedao’s mind, the scent of grass and pounding feet, a flash of white. “It destroyed an entire village.” But she was already feeding new assumptions into the model. The thing about Jedao that Kel Command had never managed to replicate in four hundred years was, in the end, his intuition. 

Servitor 1491625 blinked balefully at her. _I thought he was bad at math_.

“And I thought you were more polite,” Cheris said, pointedly aloud. It had been made very clear to them both that Jedao understood Simplified Machine Universal. 

“Take it up with Kujen,” Jedao told the servitor. He didn’t sound offended; his mind was on something else. “Cheris. We’ll be outside the hexarchate soon.”

Cheris knew, intellectually, that borders this far out didn’t have much meaning. But the symbolism mattered. The hexarchate had given her a name, a purpose, something to wrench apart one theorem at a time. There was something disorienting about existing in a space the hexarchate had never claimed, like she’d been stripped to her bones.

The needlemoth hummed underneath her feet. Beside her, Jedao was smiling his tilted smile. “That’s all anyone has here,” he told her, and she couldn’t tell if the tone in his voice was warning or triumph.

* * *

_Harmony_ was blackly thrilled by the chase, which Jedao found rather ghoulish. _We’re not looking for a fight_ , he’d told the needlemoth the first time the blips on the scans finally resolved into something resembling a proper formant. There was something at the limits of his othersense too, a gravitational anomaly, and _Harmony_ had fixed onto it with the unerring focus of a predator. 

_Cousin_ , the moth had told him with vicious finality. _This moth is not one of ours_.

“I suppose Kujen thought he’d be inconvenienced by a general who kept getting attacked by his own moths,” Jedao mused to Cheris after that revelation. The notes that _Harmony_ used to refer to the hatchling was even harsher than what it used for Cheris, conveying a hostile otherness. “He never could think beyond the hexarchate.”

“Yes,” said Cheris, who’d used that fact to crack open several of Kujen’s hideaways, and then: “We haven’t switched to the invariant drive.”

Not quite a non sequitur; Jedao had been contemplating the fact himself. “So you’ve cracked the algebra on the harness.”

Everyone knew that mothdrives didn’t work outside hexarchate calendrical terrain, but here they were, the needlemoth’s flight into Hafn space unfettered. They’d never repaired _Harmony_ ’s broken harness. Even Jedao could do the addition on this one. 

“It wasn’t hard,” Cheris said. “Once I looked.”

Her voice was very flat. It was a tone Jedao recognized intimately. He cursed, not for the first time, the Kel tendency to breed martyrs. _Suicide hawk_. It wasn’t a damned invitation.

Of course, Jedao had been Kel, too. That had been his choice.

“I don’t think it’s playing,” Cheris had said, and it took Jedao a moment to recall the moth. “I think it’s — I’d be — furious.”

It took them another two weeks to find the voidmoth — the Shparoi seven-day week, not the Kel’s. When the wailing first slammed into Jedao, in orbit above a familiar planet, he rather thought he might have preferred the fury. 

_No manners at all_ , observed _Harmony_ , whose own song had gone distinctly clear and haughty. _We should put it out of its misery_.

 _No_ , said Jedao with all the force he could muster, though the voidmoth’s discordant screeching was drilling steadily into his skull. Even Cheris gave a wince at the cacophony she could pick up over the link. _Please_ — _cousin_ — _the child is confused_.

 _It is not a child_ , the needlemoth said at once. _It is other — it is not of us — it is dangerous_. The crystal bell notes came mercilessly, inexorably, and struck Jedao with something like longing. The song-language of the moths derived _otherness_ from _belonging_ ; in speaking of danger, _Harmony_ had to speak of Jedao, too, the thing-to-be-protected, enfolded into the self. 

{Jedao,} Cheris said. Just the one word, but she spoke it the way he did, the Shparoi vowels lingering. Ten years of his ghost inside her head had given her that, at least.

The Shparoi homeland had been annexed by the Hafn a long time ago. Jedao had never thought he’d return, but here they were, the errant mothling calling out from the surface of Eshpatan. All he had was a murderous needlemoth, an opinionated servitor, and a woman who knew all of his secrets.

She’d torn apart an empire. It was imprecise to say that it’d been because of him, but it wasn't incorrect.

 _You taught me your manners_ , he told _Harmony_ , and thought about everyone in his life who had managed to teach him something. _The moth-child can learn to be ours_.

* * *

“So what does it want?” Cheris asked as they maneuvered the needlemoth to a landing onto the surface of the planet. What she could pick up of the moth from Jedao was unpleasant, but too noisy to derive meaning from. Error correction required redundancy.

“It’s young,” Jedao said, and then, belatedly, “Might be hungry.”

“What?” That was, somehow, a possibility she had not expected. This mission kept taking her by surprise, which spoke to how poorly prepared she was when it came to voidmoths.

 _There go the rest of the ration bars_ , servitor 1491625 said, resigned. _Maybe it and Jedao can eat each other_.

Strange, how she missed the quiet clarity of assassinations. There were fewer complications involved; if she failed, it would only be her life on the line. It was reflexive to blame the Shuos in Jedao for the thought, but the truth was harder to determine. When she vomited up the glassy shards of Jedao’s memory, what had stayed?

“Jedao, what’s the _plan_?”

He picked up a ration bar, weighing it in his palm. “Well, I thought we could go talk to it.”

“That,” Cheris said, “is not a plan.”

“It’s the only plan,” Jedao said. “This is a moth that has never been harnessed. There hasn’t been something like this for — well, a very long time. If your servitors want to use this moth, it should have a choice.”

When Cheris had still been infantry, she’d marched into situations on less than this. Formation instinct hadn’t given her a choice, but it’d given her something else: faith. When she offered choice to the hexarchate, she hadn’t thought about what she’d lose.

She wondered what harnesses Jedao thought were on him, moth-and-human, and Jedao suddenly laughed. “You know,” he said, “the Kel had an army before formation instinct, too.”

That was a terrifying thought, wasn’t it — just ordinary people, putting their faith in each other. There was a dizzying sensation in her ears, the way she’d felt before the Fortress of Scattered Needles, luckstone clutched in her hand. Jedao had wanted her to let go. She wasn’t sure she could.

“Cheris,” Jedao said, gently exasperated. “Do you enjoy being a martyr?”

Cheris took one shuddering breath, and then another. Servitor 1491625 skittered up to her, lit up in black and gold. Kel colors. _That’s the first sensible thing he’s said_ , it said begrudgingly. _Go, then. Feed the horrible moth_.

One couldn’t physically feel the effects of a calendrical spike. The changes happened anyway, propagating according to mathematical laws, catching people in their wake. She had chosen to be Kel, once, and then to be un-Kel. Now, Jedao was offering something else.

“I suppose,” she said, picking her words with care, “I learned it from— a friend.”

There was Jedao’s smile, crooked and familiar; she could feel its echo on her own mouth.

{Thank you,} said Jedao, and turned his gaze outward. “So yes. Let’s go feed the horrible moth.”


End file.
